A friend of mine does professional decluttering. I'm not sure how much she charges.

I would love to know.

I went to the gym and worked out for an hour.

< is grumpy but virtuous>

Came home and had leftover red beans and rice, this time with the added nummy goodness of Andouille sausage.

I can haz nap?

Declutterers/packers charge depending on their area but I can tell you that my minimum charge for the DC region was $45 per hour. And nobody blinked. I also wrote it into my contract that there was an extra charge ($20 ) per hour, if the client chose to 'work with me'.

Typical speech: "If you let me put my head down and plow through this, it will take less than half the time. Nothing will be thrown away without your approval and everything will be categorized in an easily understood system. At the end, there will be a pile of things with questions attached to them. Be prepared to spend about 20 minutes answering those questions. We will finalize all decisions before I leave and you will be good to go!"

Also, do NOT buy any storage containers/widgets until I am done. Only then will we know what you really need.

Too many people start the other way 'round and set themselves up to fail.

Too many people start the other way 'round and set themselves up to fail

No shit. I bought plastic sleeves for all my comics and boxes to store them, then they just sat there until my son came up for Christmas. He was so bored, he stuffed all the sleeves for me. Until then, all they were was more clutter.

I also wrote it into my contract that there was an extra charge ($20 ) per hour, if the client chose to 'work with me'.

I love this.

If I could do it full-time, decluttering would be a dream job.

I LOVE getting rid of stuff. I always look at it as buying more room for myself. Space is a luxury. I also really like things getting used and loved, so cool stuff which does nothing but sit in a closet or a drawer can go to someone who will use it. Good for me, good for them, good for the stuff!

Mom has a Rule of 3 for cleaning, every day she has 3 things she's going to do for the day and then during the day, (like say during a commerical break on tv) she tries to pick up and put away three things.

The additional charge had a practical motivation in addition to being a 'hassle tax'. Working with a clutterer who thinks they want order is torturous. A LOT more therapy goes into those hours and my therapy clients pay alot more! So I found myself doing hard physical labor PLUS therapy for much less money. Not a good equation for me.

Only one client ever took me up on that and it was...as predicted...hard.

I love the rule of three erika. I should adopt that.

And Scrappy is me with regards to letting stuff get used by people who will use it.

Watching "Clean Sweep" on TLC is almost painful, especially when they have people who refuse to let things go. The organizers on that show have to go through so much therapy on camera in between trying to clean out (usually) 50-70 percent of the stuff in these people's rooms.

The Boy has hoarder tendencies. Not of the magnitude that lands people on Oprah, but still -- the second bedroom in the house is appalling. In fact, *it* should be on Oprah -- it's that bad. (The rest of the house is not, and from what I understand, it's better for hoarders to have a proscribed space that's theirs, to muck up as they wish, as long as it doesn't spill into the rest of the house.)

The problem in this house is the utter lack of closets/built-in storage. There are 2 closets in the entire house. Two. One in each bedroom, and that's it. No linen closet, no front hall/coat closet, no random closet in a hallway somewhere -- none. And no built-in storage like shelving, etc.

So there's NO place to put things, except flat surfaces, like the dining-room table, and the desk, and the end tables, and and and.

I'd happily pay a declutterer to make sense of this house, and help us figure out our needs for storage so that we could build/buy shelving, etc.

Watching "Clean Sweep" on TLC is almost painful, especially when they have people who refuse to let things go.

But The Boy's biggest problem -- which goes with the hoarding tendencies -- is that he can't let go of stuff. He gets panicky and freaks out. I moved in about 14 months ago, and when I moved in, he put an old chair on the front porch because there was no room inside for it. And it sat there for over a year. He finally put it out to the trash last week.

That's the problem -- he can't just weed through a room (or a closet, or a pile of papers) and start tossing stuff. He has to get used to the idea of getting rid of stuff, and accept that "Maybe I'll use this one day" is never going to happen. And that? Apparently takes a long long LONG-ass time.

But progress does....progress. Very very very slowly. Glacially. Because the front porch is now cleaned off, for the first time in 14 months (and, in truth, longer than that, because it was chaotic even before I moved in).

I would do it so much faster, but it would make him lose it, and that's not worth it. We're getting there, but -- oh my god, so much slower than I ever imagined.